365Caws is now in its 14th year of publication, and was originally intended to end after 365 days. It has sometimes been difficult for me to find new material, particularly during the winter months, but now as I enter my own twilight years, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to provide daily posts. It is my hope that along the way I may have inspired someone to a greater curiosity about the natural world. If so, I can rest, content in the knowledge that my work here has been done.
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
Nephroma Helveticum, Fringed Kidney Lichen
Day 48: Yesterday was the first dry day we've had in a month, so I went out for a short local walk, noting in my pedestrian travels that quite a lot of debris and even some fairly good-sized trees had come down during our parade of blustery weather events. I wasn't thinking about canopy lichens when I stepped over a stick, but my mind registered an observation which filtered to the surface of my consciousness a hundred feet distant: "That looked like Kidneys." I decided not to backtrack, lured forward by the prospect of finding interesting fungi further on. Then, after having completed my circuit of the loop, I thought I might go back to photograph a bracket fungus I'd noted, and by that point, I'd forgotten all about the Kidney stick. I was on my way back to the trailhead when again as I stepped over the stick, my brain insisted that I take a closer look: "Those ARE Kidneys, and you've never seen them here before." Sure enough, the short, broken twig was covered with Nephroma helveticum, its rich mahogany-coloured apothecia rimmed with the creamy "fringe" which supplies its common name, Fringed Kidney Lichen. The light was very dim where the stick had fallen, so I carried it to a bed of step-moss where a log served as my tripod for a long exposure.
Labels:
Fringed Kidney Lichen,
Nephroma helveticum,
T Woods
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